SELF-RELIANCE DISCOURAGED IN AMERICA
By
Betty Freauf
July 26, 2011
NewsWithViews.com
In June we received notice from our garbage collector that they were going to drop off a beautiful, big blue recycling container on or about July 1 at an additional cost of $6.95. Its ad on the radio said in order to offset that additional cost, we could request a smaller can that we already have. Hubby and I are thirties depression kids. We know how to live on very little and if we don’t get our Social Security check in August, we’ll survive. While government workers are whining about their salaries and benefits, seniors haven’t received a COLA in two years.
I’d like to believe the Lord will supply all our needs according to his riches in glory through Christ Jesus (Phil: 4:19) but would that require a caveat of collective repentance in America and how many think that’s going to happen? We may end up finding three generations under one roof to survive. Political commentator H.L. Mencke once said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the population alarmed by menacing it with a endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” This, of course, is intended to make us clamor for someone to lead us to safety.
This “debt ceiling scare” reminds me how former V.P. Al Gore and his cohorts peddled their global warming propaganda for years; however, have you noticed how quiet they’ve been lately? Why? God moves in mysterious ways and on His timetable. Just two weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change was to be held in November 2009, thousands of hacked computer files and e-mails were released from the Climatic Research Unit and published worldwide proving that global-warming alarmists involved in studying global temperatures were manipulating the data. In 2010 Al Gore’s wife divorced him.
Hubby has been taking our recycling to the recycling center about once a month on his way to the bowling alley – all sorted by plastic, newspaper, cardboard, cans, bottles, etc. A recent article in the July 11, 2011 Ladies Home Journal by Catherine Newman indicated working with our hands can flood our brain with natural antidepressants so when we do meaningful work with our hands, a kind of neurochemical feedback floods our brain with Dopamine and Seratonin, which are natural antidepressants. This suggests accomplishing meaningful work like sorting the recycling is good for my husband’s brain.
Newman writes it was a survival thing – or was, originally back in the caveman days. “Americans have become more depressed in recent years and at the same time we’ve experienced a decrease in purposeful physical activity. Did we lose something vital to our mental health when we started pushing buttons instead of plowing fields?” asks Kelly Lambert, Ph.D “Working with ones hand is a way to slow down, to savor, to take pleasure in life again. Women who sew experience a significant drop in heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration. Repetitive motor activity can calm the brain,” says Dr. Marie Pasinksi, author of Beautiful Brain, Beautiful you.”
Hubby said he didn’t want the huge, blue recycling can and the extra $6.95 monthly charge so to have a little fun with the three Republican County Commissioners passing a resolution allowing the garbage service to “mandate” we take the can and pay the charge whether we used the can or not in the interest of “equality,” I wrote a letter to the local paper saying this “mandate” sounded like the Democrat ObamaCare.
The letter got published probably because I chided the Republican county commissioners about the party’s mantra of wanting “smaller government and fewer regulations.” After all it was the principle!!! I should have had hubby write it but he was recovering from successful cancer surgery earlier and needed no more stress. During his eight-week recuperation period, I had been taking the small garbage can to the foot of our paved driveway about 50 feet from our house the night before the collection. When the beautiful blue plastic can arrived, I left it in the bushes at the foot of our driveway in the cul-de-sac where it remained for three weeks gathering dust. I wondered who would win this war!!
Hubby is finally back to taking the little can down the lane. The next morning when I walked down to get our newspaper, I saw the big blue container was gone and I smirked, “I won!” I brought the little can back up the driveway and much to my surprise, by the garage doors was the big blue recycling can. I wondered how it got there. Certainly the garbage man didn’t bring it up. Maybe a nice neighbor lady did as she’d done before, I thought. I waited for hubby to get out of bed to tell him I had a surprise on the driveway. He looked at me and grinned, “I brought the blue can up last night when I took the little one down to the cul-de-sac.” Of course, like flip flopper President Barack Obama, he changed his mind and forgot to tell me. (Only another wife can enjoy this) I burst out in uncontrollable laughter because if I had gone out a different door and saw that blue container by the garage doors when I went down for the paper, I’d have taken it back down to the cul-de-sac because I was determined to win the war!
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This little game could have gone on for days. We live in a wooded area. I once lost him. I looked all over. I called some neighbors thinking he went visiting. I finally decided maybe he wandered into the woods and was about to call the sheriff to help me find him before dark when a container came flying off the roof onto the driveway. He’d been on the roof applying moss remover. I looked everywhere on land except up!
Julie Starr Hook of Salem is an organizer who helps hoarders. She wrote in a recent column how laughing can make an organizing job more enjoyable and then goes on to tell how an old warehouse on a farm had a collection of cattle bones which someone used to make Western art and how she’s found Holy water stored in the liquor cabinet, nail clippers in a silverware drawer, used pregnancy tests kept for “the memories,” gold-painted wishbones and how one person kept a diary of how long each roll of toilet paper lasted.
I rarely share personal information but this little game we were playing is so laughable it reminds me of many Washington, D.C. politicians who get elected, introduce legislation and then some U.N. unconstitutional administrative agency usually created under Democrat leadership writes the rules that do not reflect the intent of the original bill but by the time someone figures out it was bad law, it is so ingrained in society that we seldom question whether it should remain law or not.
It took Social Security that was supposed to be “supplemental insurance (not an entitlement) for the elderly, along with Medicare and Medicaid for the poor, eight decades to finally break the bank. Had S.S. been left in the trust account, it wouldn’t be in trouble today and no one ever seems to be held accountable. “Punting” or “Kicking the can down the road” is the expression we’ve been hearing from our lickspittles to keep us from going bankrupt. However, some irresponsible, spendthrift Americans have been taking bankruptcy for years; the next day they have unsolicited credit cards in the mail and without a cap on spending, the U.S. will be back in the same leaky boat that is taking on water.
Rhodes Scholar President Clinton was one of Professor Carroll Quigley’s students at Georgetown University. Quigley, an unrepentant member of the secret brotherhood, explains in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope publicized by the John Birch Society how the Council on Foreign Relations controls both parties. The Republicans are allowed to cater to the right on a few issues (pro-life, pro-fun, pro-military, pro-business) while Democrats cater to the left (pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, anti-gun- anti-war, pro-union.)
Hubby finally decided by succumbing to the blue recycling container, we might be helping the unemployed regain some self-dignity working to separate all the items. On July 20th when I discovered the blue container at our house, there was an article in the newspaper by Ruben Navarrette, Jr. from the Washington Post about the E-Verify system. His article entitled, “Farms Depend on Labor of Illegal Immigrants,” told how when he was in college, his roommate from New York City – aware that he’d grown up in the farmlands of Central California –asked him “What time of year do workers pick the raisins?” He said when he stopped laughing he explained to the city slickers that you don’t pick raisins. You pick grapes and then lay them out in the sun to make raisins.
Ruben went on to remind us that milk does not come from cartons in the supermarket, tomatoes can’t be picked by machine unless we want ketchup and peaches do not magically fall from trees into the boxes and that summer means harvest for many crops. He visited Eric Larson, executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau and asked how so many Americans became disconnected from the realities of life on the farm. The answer, “We’re a victim of our own success. We go to the store and there’s always food there. So we take it for granted and someone grew it so we can buy it. And as time goes by, we think less and less about the person who grew it” which, of course, has led to us losing our self-reliant spirit of survival.
A farmer’s letter to the editor in our local paper says, “Visas for seasonal foreign agricultural guest workers are available and have been for years.” However, today, rather than go to the fields to help out the farmer with his worker shortage, following in the footsteps of socialist Europe, Americans would sooner pick up their unemployment or welfare check and then meander to the department that hands out food stamps and rent subsidies. But that supply of food on our store shelves due to too much abusive government intervention and regulations may come abruptly to an end. Eric Larson from the San Diego County Farm Bureau said “without a comprehensive solution” to our farm worker problem, there would be trouble ahead. “If we don’t like being dependent on foreign oil, just wait until we’re dependent on foreign food.” That is “food” for thought as our Western World, short of divine intervention, is on the brink of total financial collapse.
Why is it that Obama and his cronies in his administration said in 2010 we were experiencing a recovery and boasted at how the bailouts saved America? However, in December 2007 there were approximately 27.4 million food stamp recipients but the number today of 44.1 million Americans are receiving benefits. Is this a sign of “recovery?”
When we first moved to the Willamette Valley in 1961, there were no such shortages of workers. The schools would accommodate the farmer when necessary and start school later or earlier as needed and the farmers would send busses to pick up these young folks who learned a work ethic and self-reliance. At that time, mothers working outside the home weren’t as prevalent as they are now and often mothers and the kids would be seen working the fields. Then Big Brother created “no fault divorce,” and now single mothers are among the highest poverty rate. When I was a legal secretary in the late 50s, couples could not remarry within a year of their divorce. That gave them a “cooling off” period to re-evaluate such an action.
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And in order to comply to the Communist-controlled United Nations “Rights of the Child,” child labor laws were implemented and now instead of kids working in the fields in the summer time, they are running in gangs, stealing from businesses, shooting and killing each other, painting graffiti on businesses and instead of midnight dishwashing we find midnight basketball as provided in Clinton’s Crime bill back in 1994. The same politicians who applaud midnight basketball will assume a business owner who keeps kids overtime (more than three hours at night on a week day) is a slave driver who violates child labor laws. Also under the Clinton administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed and the illegals have been flooding across our borders ever since. I wonder who will be sorting the recycleables my husband once did.
� 2011 Betty Freauf - All Rights Reserved
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